Election fiascos hurt Michigan Republicans on fraud issue they have long highlighted (poll)

LANSING, MI - For years, Michigan Republicans have put voter fraud on their agenda - despite there being little evidence that it is nothing but an extremely rare occurrence.

But after two embarrassing election-related fiascos involving their own in recent months, have Republicans lost their credibility on the issue?

Democrats certainly think so, calling the other side hypocritical.

"They don't care about giving everyone access to the ballot. They care about winning at all costs - even when that cost is breaking the law and deceiving the public," state Democratic Party Chairman Mark Brewer wrote in a Detroit News op-ed.

Kent County's Republican prosecutor determined no election laws were broken during Rep. Roy Schmidt's switch from Democrat to Republican at the May 15 filing deadline - a move aided by GOP House Speaker Jase Bolger - but he said he was embarrassed by "shenanigans" that resulted in a fake Democrat going on the ballot.

In the aftermath of another May 15 filing debacle, Republican Attorney General Bill Schuette last week charged four aides to former GOP U.S. Rep. Thaddeus McCotter with helping submit fraudulent petitions in an attempt to qualify him for the ballot. While McCotter was not charged, he was accused by Schuette of being "asleep at the switch."

Though both cases did not involve voter fraud, they pertain to the broader issue of election fraud.

Democrats, of course, are no saints when it comes to election tampering.

But by making electoral fraud a top issue, it has been Republicans especially who have opened themselves up to charges of hypocrisy.

Despite the missteps in recent months, Lansing political analyst and former GOP state lawmaker Bill Ballenger said he expects Republicans to continue targeting electoral fraud as an issue.

"They're going to keep on doing that," said Ballenger, editor of Inside Michigan Politics. "I don't think voters are going to say, 'You're a bunch of phonies or hypocrites.' Republicans themselves have said this is an embarrassment, it shouldn't have happened."

"Republicans are obviously the party that projects itself as combating fraud in the election place. The Democrats are always the party that wants to err on the side of increasing voter turnout and giving people the benefit of the doubt and encouraging people to vote."Are Republicans more or less credible on the voter-fraud issue after the Thad McCotter, Jase Bolger situations?Craig Ruff, a senior policy fellow at Public Sector Consultants in Lansing, said he - like Ballenger - doubts the recent GOP embarrassments will have much of an impact across the state outside of the congressional seat vacated by McCotter and state House districts held by Bolger and Schmidt.

"Nobody wants wrongdoing placed at the doorstep of their own public official," Ruff said. "But generally speaking, voters in others areas of the state just don't care too deeply. ... They're isolated events that don't necessarily drive state public policy change or political change."

Meanwhile, both parties continue to fight over photo ID requirements and other efforts described by Republicans as protecting the integrity of the ballot box and Democrats as voter suppression.

A ballot application check box asking Michigan voters to confirm their U.S. citizenship caused some confusion at the polls during Tuesday's primary, though Republican Secretary of State Ruth Johnson said she verified only two cases where someone was initially denied a ballot after refusing to check the citizenship box.

Johnson says her intent in adding the check box was to protect people who inadvertently registered to vote from potentially committing a felony.

The Michigan Democratic Party, however, has said a Freedom of Information Act request it made to the secretary of state showed just four non-citizens tried to vote in the Feb. 28 presidential primary, in which 1.2 million votes were cast.

Ballenger, who has been following Michigan politics for more than 40 years, said the potential for voter fraud is out there - given that people die and change addresses - but the odds are very low.

"There's some dead wood on voter registration rolls," he said. "The idea that that's going to be exploited or used in a deliberate scheme by some group out there to use dead people, duplicates or people who have moved out of the state? Nobody has ever come up with any evidence that that's happened that I know of."